Like most compelling theology, Anna Mercedes’s reclamation of kenosis for feminist theology emerges from autobiography. Moved from a young age by the Christian call to be generous in our disposition toward others, Mercedes’s later encounter with feminism prompted confusion. On the one hand, she felt empowered by feminist calls to agency and subjectivity. Yet she also heard feminists suggesting that the giving away of self was a sort of feminist sin. For Mercedes, however, openhearted generosity toward others was not simply a virtue she had been taught; frequently it was a genuine pleasure and indeed a central mode of her own relational, creative subjectivity. This prompted yet further confusion, for feminists were telling her both to trust her own experiences and to not too readily give of herself. Were they saying she had to choose between their way of thinking and the Christian faith that had so richly fed her and her family and community? This was more than an existential crisis for then seminarian Mercedes—it was a pastoral one. For she perceived an implicit (and problematic) judgment underpinning the forced choice between feminist values and Christian ones: feminist thinkers, wittingly or not, appeared to be blaming women for the ills that beset them, as if to say, “Yes, patriarchal Christianity is bad, but you really do have a choice about whether you embrace its tenets or not, whether you stay or go.” Power For is Mercedes’s response to the false choice between feminist subjectivity and Christian generosity. She not only claims the possibility of both, but she offers a constructive vision of how subjectivity might be abundantly, even pleasurably, achieved through a Christic giving of self.

To build her vision, Mercedes takes a lovingly critical stance toward both the Christian theological heritage and feminist thought. While interrogating the patriarchal notion of “power over,” including how even the doctrine of kenotic self-giving has been co-opted by coercive power structures, Mercedes also critiques the notion that the “power with” / mutuality model can be the only viable concept of power for feminist theology. Her critiques are appreciative and careful. Even as her goal is to excavate the virtues of a kenotic “power for” model, she rightfully acknowledges the importance of “power with,” both historically and now. Likewise, she appreciates the risks of kenosis and why it might be questioned as a legitimate figure of “power,” for it does come awfully close to the early feminist diagnoses of “woman’s” struggle—Valerie Saiving’s self-effacement, Catherine Keller’s solubility, Serene Jones’ fragmentation.1 Yet Mercedes not only illuminates the beauties and rewards of kenotic power but persuasively argues that in many circumstances, a kenotic expression of power is more viable than mutuality. She aptly observes that while mutuality is an ideal to which we might and should aim, in a world of intractable hierarchies rarely is it achieved, for we simply cannot guarantee a mutual stance from the Other. That is, we only have power over our own expression of power.

In contrast to mutuality, of which we can secure only one half (if even that), kenotic power has the capacity to act within, under, and counter to whatever coercive forces are at play, not necessarily overcoming those forces but nonetheless serving as a form of resistance—for the sake of autonomy, however limited, and occasionally survival. Chapter 5, “Power for Resistance: Abuse and Self-Giving Care,” illustrates this dynamic at work in contexts of domestic abuse, where victims may not be able to escape the abusive situations in which they are trapped but where they can counter their very victimhood through small but significant acts of resistance and care toward self and others—acts that evince their creative autonomy.

This argument incorporates a vital awareness of the complexity of power relations, breaking out of any dualistic, essentialist concepts of relationship or identity. In Mercedes’s words, she is striving to move “beyond the binary pair.” Most culturally aware scholars, acknowledging the structural complexities of power relations, would affirm that we all are victims as well as perpetrators depending on relational context. But even that perhaps states the matter too simplistically. In a world of vast relational multiplicity, far exceeding our comprehension, we do not have the time to consider our multivalent positionalities in each and every circumstance. Mercedes recovers the kenotic disposition from the Christian tradition and transforms it using feminist and postmodern theories. The result is a relational disposition bearing the capacity both to empower agency and to open us to the Other(s) we encounter, not as a substitute for “power with” but as a rich and viable supplement.

There are three particular elements of Mercedes’s proposal that incite my curiosity and that I invite her to explore further—one because it intersects with my own recent explorations; one because I harbor some concerned skepticism; and one because it may push Mercedes further in the direction she is already going, thus serving as a challenge to extend her thought.

Vulnerability . . . and Pleasure

One of the most compelling pieces of Mercedes’s argument is its profound honoring of vulnerability, ambiguity, and risk as marks of embodied, relational living. In her kenotic erotics, Mercedes strives to honor our vulnerability as profoundly relational creatures—celebrating the tender goods that arise from vulnerability while avoiding any unqualified glorification of vulnerability as a modus operandi for all circumstances. Ultimately she shows that vulnerability is more powerful then we realize. For Mercedes, pleasure empowers, at least in the moment of its arising, and in this way can engender transformation. Yet pleasure requires a sort of letting go, a relaxation, a dropping of defenses that can leave one vulnerable. Yet (again) when the standard counsel is to protect the ego at all costs, releasing into vulnerability is itself part of the pleasure. It also frees our energies for non-hostile forms of relating to others, a radical and refreshing concept in a world that still rewards patriarchal modes of relation. The positive, productive role that vulnerability plays in pleasure as well as transformation grounds Mercedes’s argument that kenotic power is indeed power-full, a genuine manifestation of creative, proactive agency rather than its suppression.

Just as Mercedes probes the relation between pleasure and transformation, in my own work I have been exploring the potential relation between beauty and justice. In both cases, an honoring of vulnerability, along with risk and ambiguity, seems to be key. Opening ourselves to the possibility of unexpected encounter makes the experience of beauty possible. Might the cultivation of beauty be a way, I ask, to practice the vulnerability of self-opening that is also necessary for transformation toward meaningful justice? Rather than doggedly pursuing the just at the expense of the beautiful, perhaps an aesthetics of compassion could nurture a more subtle, more diffuse, but ultimately more transformative web of enriching relations. I see in Mercedes’s argument a resonant move: the best chance for change, she seems to suggest, is pleasure arising, necessarily, from vulnerability and directed toward change. Reclaiming the value of vulnerability is becoming something of a trend,2 which I celebrate. Yet I tremble at the implications of this message being misheard, of falling into the wrong hands. In many ways, Mercedes’s entire book attends to the reality of that risk, all the while acknowledging that it is not a risk that can—or even perhaps should—be solved. To risk pleasure is unavoidably to also risk harm.

Risking Pleasure—and Harm

In chapter 3, Mercedes proposes “kenotic erotics” as an alternative to the traditional polarities of self-sacrificing agape and (presumably) self-involved eros. A kenotic erotics recognizes the complex textures of relational power, including the reality that the giving-away of oneself can be genuinely pleasurable. In chapter 4, Mercedes offers martyrdom and masochism as examples of kenotic erotics, where the active pursuit of passivity and even pain can be in itself pleasurable. Mercedes shows that feminist scholarship has tended to criticize and in turn reject masochistic discourse as a source of positive insight about subjectivity, power, or pleasure. By contrast, she wants to lay claim to some of its insights on precisely feminist grounds. Mercedes is correct that feminist thought in general and feminist theology specifically can only lose when they foreclose possibilities for creative insight. The provocations emerging from queer and s/m discourse offer rich possibilities for third-wave feminist thought. As Mercedes herself notes, however, questions and concerns continue to hover—and are worth exploring. Here I pose two.

While risk of pain, and possibly pain itself, are part of the point of masochism, doesn’t healthy masochism rest in a more foundational mutuality of trust? This may only prove Mercedes’s point that kenotic power works in tandem with, if also against, both coercive and mutual forms of power. But it also points up that non-abusive masochism rests upon a foundation of mutuality, even if that mutuality is performatively suspended. The recent release of the film version of Fifty Shades of Grey prompted a deserved outcry from concerned adults everywhere, self-identified as feminist or not, that its portrayal of romance was in fact a portrait of abuse. They asked, “Is this what we are teaching our young people love is?” The most compelling piece I read, however, was “Consent Isn’t Enough: The Troubling Sex of Fifty Shades,” explicating how the film gave the BDSM community and its practices a bad name.3 What was missing in the film’s portrayal—genuine rather than coerced consent, agreed-upon guidelines, safety words—are all instantiations of relational mutuality. While healthy masochism risks and even courts pain, it can only do so with integrity when the deeper context is reciprocity, respect, and trust. Thus, if we are to look to healthy masochism as an example of kenotic erotics, we must grant that the mutual precedes and makes possible the masochistic.

This leads to a second concern regarding the pairing of martyrdom and masochism. Respected scholars of early Christian history and thought have plumbed the deep resonances between martyrdom and masochism. Mercedes constructively draws on this compelling body of work, specifically on its insights that both practices court pain as pleasure, thereby performing unexpected reversals that give rise to unexpected subjectivities. Aspects of this pairing remain unconvincing however, specifically because the underlying power dynamics are distinct, especially if the focus is early Christian martyrs in imperial Rome. It would seem that such martyrs, even if they were not “pure victims,” would have more in common with those who suffer domestic and sexual abuse (as Mercedes discusses in chapter 5)—manifesting a resistance to power over—than with masochists who explore the pleasures of subjective dissolution as a suspension of a taken-for-granted power with. Granting that the martyrs’ pleasure seems to have derived from their devotion to God, from the conviction that their social resistance to empire flowed from and toward the Divine Beloved, I come back to the pastoral quandaries raised by celebrations of martyrdom, especially as they transmute into minimally informed theological imaginaries. An imperfect yet relevant analogy can be found in cutting, a disturbingly common practice among young people. The practice of cutting—not for aesthetic purposes but as a coping strategy—is a way of claiming some sort of agency in the context of perceived disempowerment (vis-à-vis abuse, social pressures, depression, etc.). If cutting is a teen’s best perceived strategy for coping because it gives her a sense of control and/or of release (dare we call this pleasure?), we certainly should not blame this young person/“victim.” But are we to encourage her to continue, much less to celebrate this form of self-“care” and resistance, or do we encourage her down another path?

“Kenosis carries one beyond balance,” says Mercedes, “beyond safety, and certainly beyond certainty. It is an act of faith” (131). As noted above, in my own work I affirm the power of risked vulnerability: its power for social change, for self-transformation, even for pleasure. Yet I still wonder at martyrdom and masochism as models. The line between “risking danger” and “dangerous” is a fine but consequential one precisely because, as Mercedes herself notes, “mimicry and mimesis may vary vastly in significance but only slightly in kind” (107). It would seem that the subjectivity of the person in question determines which it is. The pastoral question then becomes, who is the audience for a theology of kenotic erotics that advocates the possibility of pain as pleasure? How do we convey the subtle yet significant nuances here?

Subjects, Bounded & Permeable

Finally and very briefly. Among postmodern thinkers, in the wake of Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, there is general consensus that as subjects we are relationally constituted. More recently, Butler has expanded upon this view in Precarious Life and other pieces, offering that the other not only establishes the boundaries of our self but also dissolves the same: even in “safe” relationships we are both created and undone in our encounter with others, over and over again. This is not Keller’s solubility, but instead a more nuanced articulation of Keller’s intersubjective relationality: much like skin itself, intersubjective boundaries are neither static nor solid; they are fluid and permeable while no less, well, bounded. If Mercedes’s postmodern portrayal of kenosis challenges the static binaries of active and passive, of sacrifice and generosity, of pain and pleasure, where might this recent, even more nuanced Bulterian insight about subjective permeability take Mercedes’s thought? Indeed, might it even complicate while possibly answering some of the questions I offer above?

Postscript

Let me conclude on my own autobiographical note as a means of disclosure, confession, and appreciation. Disclosure: Anna Mercedes and I went through our doctoral program together at Drew University, in some ways as twins. We started the same day, sat in most of the same seminars, studied under the same mentors, and defended our dissertations mere weeks apart. Along the way, we commiserated, usually over beer, about our academic challenges and our personal lives even as we competed for some of the same coveted jobs (happily, we both “won” in the end). Now in the thick of our jobs, we enjoy an email exchange about once a year, twice if we’re lucky. Confession: Even though Anna entered our program already knowing she wanted to pursue the question of kenosis and thus consistently brought kenosis into discussions, I never quite got it, perhaps because I tended toward a more second-wave feminist outlook. To me, the risks seemed too great. Clearly some of them still do. Appreciation: Yet while certain risks of kenotic erotics still give me pause, Anna’s theological vision—developed with such care, passion, and conviction—has graced my own, helping me to refine my thoughts on the role of risky vulnerability in the pursuit of both pleasure/beauty and transformation/justice, which have more to do with one another than orthodox theology has been willing to grant. “I suspect,” says Anna Mercedes, “that, even in its potent utility, passionate kenosis will be best when experienced first as pleasure: undertaken for the sake of its own hearty, gritty bliss. Then, in the currents of that pleasure, may we experience a regeneration and reorganization of power: letting go in a satisfying peal of laughter and effort, at once transcendent and embodied, feeling the tension slip, knowing that things, if momentarily, imperfectly, impurely, have been made new” (137). I’m in.

In Power For: Feminism and Christ’s Self-Giving, Anna Mercedes shows us why feminist theologians have rightly worried about a traditional picture of Christ’s self-giving, as well as the kind of spirituality it has engendered. Mercedes claims that the evolution of patristic accounts of kenosis operate against the backdrop of an unjust patriarchal social formation of the self, wherein a “separative” masculine self is defined by the aggressive assertion of power over others, while the “soluble” feminine self is defined by a self-subordinating accommodation to separative selves (5). So whereas Christ’s exemplary self-emptying and his call to a similar self-effacing humility purport to expose masculine ego, it only does so by reinforcing its patriarchal assumptions. God in his omnipotence and impassibility does not share power but imposes it, and thus exemplifies a masculine identity who rewards the “feminine” solubility of those human subjects who follow Jesus’s example of self-giving, a self-abnegating kenosis enjoined upon men and women alike.

This allegedly redemptive humility—the “Great Inversion” of exaltation in humility, empowerment through weakness, gaining life by suffering its loss, etc.—is in fact for women neither an inversion of their social location nor is it redemptive. For while men receive Christ’s call to self-giving from a subject-position of separative “over-against” power, women receive it as a reinforcement of their self-subordinating identities as soluble selves. We need only consider the steadfast deferential love of the victim of domestic abuse to see what is wrong with this picture. Far from being redemptive, her soluble self-giving empowers her abuser while serving only to be personally disempowering and disintegrating for her. In the face of this challenge, how can we appropriate Christ’s self-emptying as redemptive rather than oppressive? Many feminist theologians have answered simply: we can’t. The burden of Mercedes’s book is to show us that we can reformulate rather than abandon a kenotic Christology. In this preference for critical retrieval over outright repudiation, Mercedes stands in agreement with feminist theologians such as Sarah Coakley and Kathryn Tanner, and I too wish to cast in my lot with them.

Where Mercedes parts company from Coakley and Tanner (and, from me, too, as we shall see) is in holding that a feminist reformulation of kenosis requires us to reject a classical conception of God as immutable, impassible, and omnipotent. Instead, she holds that we must embrace a God who meets us in Christ as a self-emptying and passible God, one whose desire for us moves God into a willing dependence on us for God’s own becoming, and thereby calls upon us to be likewise moved into a similar sort of self-emptying in relation to others. This divine self-emptying, Mercedes claims, is an empowered and self-interested kenosis and as such it can resist the separative/soluble relations of “power over” characteristic of patriarchal social formation. Approaches such as Coakley’s (and I wonder whether Mercedes would include Tanner here as well?) that appeal to a more traditional and classical conception of God to ground a liberating kind of self-giving—one that resists patriarchy—necessarily fail because they can only offer “some nullification of the self in the name of another’s power” (128). This contest of strategies for achieving a feminist doctrine of kenosis is the rhetorical frame for the entire argument that follows.

It is thus the irremediable failure of the patristic picture in chapter 1 that sends Mercedes looking for the alternative she subsequently develops. But it seems to me that Mercedes fails to demonstrate that classical theism necessarily entails patriarchal “power over,” and this leaves those of us sympathetic to the liberative potential of the classical picture with insufficient motivation to embrace Mercedes’s alternative. In pressing this objection below, I hope to prompt further discussion around two questions: first, in what sense does classical theism necessitate an expression of patriarchal power? Second, if a patristic doctrine of kenosis could subvert rather than reinforce patriarchal power, then what reasons might we have to prefer Mercedes’s picture over a feminist retrieval of a classical Christology?

Mercedes demonstrates in this book that she is willing to take big risks in advocating for a kenotic Christology of empowered self-giving. She boldly confronts the “complications” of masochistic desire in search of “creative uses of willed and pained self-abandon” as a means of “subversive pleasure,” recognizing that this “remains a delicate challenge” for feminist appropriation, given the danger of legitimating self-destructive behavior and abuse (109). Recognizing that “expression of kenotic desire often walks a fine line between subversion and suppression” (136), Mercedes is committed to a principled need for nuanced discernment: there is no clear line between a “good” vs. “exploitative” kenosis, for otherwise she would “be setting up the same over-and-against postures that kenosis itself has a capability to productively confuse” (153). It is puzzling therefore, that she should encourage us to risk exploitative misappropriation and enjoin upon us the responsibility of such delicate and nuanced discernment in order to retrieve the benefits of a masochistic God who meets us passibly in Christ’s subversive care for others, while at the same time being so risk-averse to classical theism and so principled in her rejection of classical theists who attempt to walk the “fine line between suppression and subversion” in their own feminist retrievals of the tradition. So what reasons are we given to be so risk averse to the impassible, immutable, and omnipotent God of Coakley’s retrieval? And how can Mercedes coherently ask us to resist an “over-and-against posture” in managing the risks of her own picture even while asking us to give up on risking the retrieval of the classical picture as Coakley does?

As far as I can see, the primary charge is that Coakley (and presumably, the classical theist per se?) is insufficiently critical of the classical understanding of divine power as a kind of separative “power over” (32, 35). Like Paul’s appeal to kenosis in Philippians 2 to exert his ecclesiastical power, or the imperial appeal to a purely human kenosis to justify its compensatory use of divine power, Mercedes claims that Coakley’s doctrine of kenosis “can be used to reify concepts of God’s power over us” (30). The modality of this claim is significant: we need not dispute that a classical understanding of God can be abused and appropriated for patriarchal power—we’ve just seen above that Mercedes says as much about her own doctrine of kenosis: it unavoidably risks the possibility of misappropriation. If she wants to induce us to set aside the classical picture, therefore, she would have to show something much stronger, that it must be used to reify concepts of God’s power over us, or perhaps that it is somehow more intrinsically prone to misappropriation than her own picture—and I wonder whether Mercedes could say something more about how she might establish the grounds for that stronger claim.

There are points at which Mercedes describes Coakley’s retrieval of a classical picture of God as entailing the concept of a separative self, such that it “implies that God’s virility thrives when hovering over the disarmed, submissive human” (36) and posits a “cosmic contrast between power and vulnerability” (37) with “omni-power” being understood as a typically patriarchal “total control over everything” (38). But leaving aside for the moment whether Coakley would herself would avow these characterizations as a recognizable gloss on her views (I suspect she wouldn’t), they are in any case caricatures of the classical understanding (although they seem to be caricatures oft repeated in the literature upon which Mercedes draws). In particular, this reading of God’s “omni-power” fails to capture the classical conception of divine power as transcendent, which is not to say that the ultimacy and limitlessness of divine power is remote, but that it is of a categorically different sort than creaturely power, even in its non-coercive nature. Mercedes misses this point precisely in characterizing Coakley’s conception of the non-coerciveness of divine power as “gentle” (30). God’s power is neither hard nor gentle, neither invulnerable nor vulnerable, but rather that mysterious and inscrutable power that makes all creaturely power possible. Kathryn Tanner has summarized the classical picture well by describing divine power as “non-competitive”: it is not party to the push and pull of creaturely exercises of power, where the exercise of one person’s power must edge out or impose an external limit on the exercise of another’s. On classical theism, as for Tanner (and, I suspect, for Coakley), God’s omni-power is not limitless because of its total domination over creaturely power, but because it is the non-competitive metaphysical ground of creaturely power.

Can God meet us in the human kenosis of Christ, on this picture? Yes, because Christ is God’s transcendent or non-competitive power manifest humanly—in a manner appropriate to our creatureliness. In Christ we see that human manifestations of God’s own non-competitive power are non-violent, non-coercive, and resist any bids for domination. A proper use of that sort of power refuses to diminish others in its exercise. Moreover, this imaging of divine power in its human form is taken up freely under conditions of personal autonomy and retains an element of self-interest: “For this reason the Father loves me,” Jesus says, “because I lay down my life that I may take it again. No one takes it from me but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down and I have power to take it again” (John 10:17–18 RSV). On the classical picture, transcendent divine power manifest in the immanence of human agency is a self-giving nourished by a recognition of divine love and aimed at one’s own flourishing, a self-giving in which the interests of self coincide rather than compete with the interests of others. Like Mercedes’s picture, the proper appropriations of a Christlike kenotic agency is a matter of discernment, and it is therefore compatible with patriarchal misappropriations. Such misappropriations are in fact well-attested in the patristic and medieval church, but so are the liberative uses of this picture. Gregory of Nyssa, for example, insists that the human imaging of divine freedom is precisely what precludes any form of human domination over one another.

More could be said on behalf of the liberative potential of divine impassibility and immutability on the classical picture, but perhaps I’ve said enough to indicate that perhaps its wholesale rejection is not particularly well-motivated. To suppose it is invites a further and more substantive argument from Mercedes than the one she has given. But if we can in the absence of such an argument provisionally admit something as modest as the mere possibility of a non-patriarchal construal of God on a classical Christology, then this is enough to put such a picture on a liberative par with that which Mercedes has recommended. For recall Mercedes’s concession that her account at best gets us the mere possibility of a liberative appropriation, not any guarantee. So in the absence of any good argument for the claim that a classical understanding of God necessarily reinforces a patriarchal social formation of separative/soluble selves, we have at best a standstill in deciding between feminist retrievals such as Coakley’s or Tanner’s and feminist revisions such as the one Mercedes has offered.

This sort of situation prompts the second question I’ve mentioned above, that of whether we have any reasons other than moral-practical ones to embrace Mercedes’s Christology. For while a particular sort of process metaphysics is required by her Christology, Mercedes does not anywhere in the book offer us any rigorous explication or defense of that metaphysics as true or coherent. Does she hold that a morally adequate account is sufficient to establish the metaphysical adequacy of that account? If so, then her only way of advancing her Christology would be by breaking the stalemate of liberative potential between her position and those classical positions she rejects. What sort of considerations does she suppose might tip the scales in that way? But if she instead takes the theological metaphysics requisite to her Christology to be preferable to a classical metaphysics independently of its possible moral (mis)use, then this could give us further, non-moral, grounds upon which to break the stalemate. But then we seem to be owed a fuller account of the metaphysical backdrop for her Christology and some reasons why we ought to prefer it to the classical package. Determining which of these routes, if either, Mercedes is inclined to take might prove interesting for further conversation.

Suppose that Mercedes accepts my critique of her argument strategy: she might well turn that critique back on me and ask why we should break the stalemate in favor of the classical picture, when in fact its liberative potential for women (and people of color, for that matter) has for so long failed to be realized. I would have two main lines of response. First, while the project of leveraging the classical tradition in this way is still in many ways in its infancy, I would contend that it offers a richer reservoir of moral-practical conceptual resources upon which to draw than those offered by its rivals (although it has much to learn from them as well). Second, I would argue that where the theological metaphysics of the classical tradition is incompatible with more recent accounts (such as those offered by process theologians), the classical picture remains on the whole more clearly coherent and defensible than its rivals. I may well be wrong on both counts—that is something I am very much willing to take up in further discussion with Mercedes. The primary point of this essay, however, has just been to suggest that whereas it seems to be a primary burden of Power For to show that I (as a classical theist) am mistaken on both counts, I can’t see that this burden has been met.

Growing up, I heard stories of my grandmother’s WWII ordeals, fleeing to a refugee camp with three young children, resettling in a new place after the end of the war, and fighting to provide a home for her family as a single mother. These stories were marked by endurance and sacrifice in the face of oppression and discrimination, and often entailed a narrative that all suffering was done for the children—self-giving acts for the sake of others. My mother also has stories of self-sacrifice and endurance in her life, charting her own survival in the midst of bullying, discrimination, and marginalization in our family and wider community. In the rare moments she talks to me about her experiences, she frames her decision to remain in such painful situations that made her feel powerless about her fate in terms of giving herself for the children, for the family—suffering abuse so that those she loves might thrive. Submission, sacrifice, agency, voice, resistance, becoming, vulnerability, relationships, risk, faithfulness . . . how do we understand these stories of self-giving as a feminist who is also concerned with agency and empowerment?

Anna Mercedes points out that these issues are often approached from a perspective that maintains the exclusive tension between self-sacrifice and self-assertion. The theological solutions offered then reinforce concepts of power in which one will have to give for the other to emerge. But how do you follow a faith and theological trajectory that emphasizes sacrifice, taking up one’s cross, and—if necessary for the sake of following Christ—a subjugation to the powers that be (an Anabaptist theological value), while also recognizing and resisting the harm done in the supremacist systems of Christian, white, heterosexist patriarchy?

Mercedes constructively takes up kenosis where feminist critiques have abandoned it, or where reclaiming attempts need to be expanded/nuanced in order to avoid domineering concepts of power. She beautifully and skillfully weaves together biblical, historical, and contemporary theological voices along with lived experiences as she critiques and critically expands and employs her sources. Her vision of kenosis, or self-emptying, is productive and generative, communal and self-incarnating; a reorganization and perversion of power in its risky and confusing embrace of desire and pleasure in our lives despite or because of the tragic contexts of our lives. It is a kenosis that is a practice and (im)pulse for the other that always also sustains in its vulnerability.

There are a few points in her work where I would love to engage in a discussion with her. In her fifth chapter, Mercedes employs studies and stories of persons surviving abuse to show how the resistance that sometimes emerges comes in the form of care, an active and creative kenosis that is also a reemergence into one’s full emotional life (123). Because Mercedes takes such care to tune into lived experiences, the creative responses to pain and suffering and their psychological framing here, I am curious where her explorations could go if lived experiences would have joined the conversation in chapter 4 as well. There, Mercedes explores (sado)masochism, desire, and self-giving pain as productive, and provides a much needed feminist theological exploration of masochism. Drawing on Karmen MacKendrick, Mercedes elicits a relational, subversive, agentic kenosis that may manifest in an erotic sharing of power, and a powerful eroticism in which empowerment is in the active desiring, seeking, and creating pleasure in dependence, subjection, and restraint (108–9).

Mercedes puts into conversation discursive constructions of the Christian self in interpretations of masochism in Christian asceticism, the emergence of Christian identity as the suffering self in early Christian accounts, and contemporary feminist critiques. She presents the seeking out of pain as giving over of the self but on one’s own terms, for the sake of redemption in self-realizing transgression. Kenosis then is the invigorating, pleasurable release of power, a release that is desired in vigorous enactments of submission. This kenotic dynamic challenges dominating “power-over,” and instead reveals power as fluid and ungraspable, which as desire as well as act of faith navigates the slippery line of oppression, victimization, subversion, and agentic pleasure (131).

I believe Mercedes would find the theological and ethical explorations of BDSM emerging out of kink communities relevant and, well, sexy theological material (and no, I’m not referring to Fifty Shades of Grey). Patrick Califia, in the essay “Sadomasochism and Spirituality,” also joins the critique of Heyward’s link between sadomasochistic practices and domestic/sexual abuse which may circumvent a liberatory, sex-positive, and agentic perspective on self-giving (and) pleasure in sexual pain. Califia highlights dimensions of lived experiences in a BDSM encounter that may enrich Mercedes’s exploration of kenosis, such as preliminary negotiations, clarification of limits and desires, continuous conversations, community expectations of continued affirming relationships and aftercare (as well as actual BDSM techniques, which have an affinity with sacred ceremonies cross-culturally).

Mutual validation and striving towards transcendence are part of sexual encounters that involve pleasurable pain, and in such encounters sexuality, spirituality, and religion overlap. In terms of our conversation on kenosis, Califia and other perspectives might bring constructive contributions, as in the observation that simulation and replication are not the same; that is, BDSM is not a replication of a patriarchal structure (as Heyward and Harrison would have it) but rather a simulation, a performance a staging of a scene in which emotional dynamics and erotic activities that bring about appropriate levels of risk, safety, and control are willfully and consensually engaged in. The lived experiences Califia describes—of connection with other living beings, respect for life and love, confrontation of fear, experiences of generosity and compassion, truth-telling of desires and longings, and growing in self-love—are experiences Mercedes also invokes in her construction of kenosis. She goes a different route to get there. But I believe that these connections with lived experiences and voices from the sexual margins—and the theological emergences in them—could lend concepts like kenosis, which already always need translation and filled with everyday speech and applications, useful traction.

The field of disability studies is yet another area in which subjectivity and agency are theologically explored via lived embodied experiences and with an eye towards power with and for in relationality. Here I believe another productive conversation could take place, especially since disability perspectives constructively challenge and explore self-giving, care, mutuality, and facets of power in personal and political relationships. For example, Rosemary Garland-Thomson’s exploration of “staring” vs. “beholding,” conceives of the embodied and relational exchanges between persons in visual encounters, exchanges that carry interests and power and may shape the relational dynamic into domination, curiosity, wonder, hostility, love, etc. In disability performance art, the artist manipulates the stare and gives oneself over to be stared at, yet on controlled terms of the encounter, demanding a reconceiving of what it means to be human. Resonant with Mercedes’s kenosis, “beholding,” then, may become a productive, mutual becoming into humanity through the giving-over of oneself to the other.

Theologian Deborah Creamer in Disability and Christian Theology also points out that the embodied subject, with her desires and agentic actions, is always already presumed to be whole in body and spirit, so that a person with disabilities often already enters the conversation as less than whole or lacking subjects, if she enters as subject at all (more often than not she might be rendered as object). Creamer reminds us in her limits model of disability that we as humans are all, unsurprisingly, limited and (connecting here to the fluid self-emptying and evocation of Mercedes’s wet, kenotic chrism) leaking bodily subjects. To begin theological reflection from this perspective (which includes Mercedes’s construction on kenosis) might keep us grounded in and always bring us back into our embodied, living, fleshy experiences. Attending to the disruptions, unruliness, leaky messiness of our actual bodies might evoke dimensions of kenosis that involve our everyday self-emptying as living, leaking bodies in their productive, generative, sustaining, and resisting dimensions. Kenosis, as Mercedes conceives of it, is indeed embodied. So what do our limited and bodily experiences tell us about reorganization and perversion of power, about the risky and confusing desires and pleasures in our lives that sustain us?

These are two of the many possible entry points of conversation with disability studies, but in this constructive space, I would like to hear Mercedes speak to her understanding of subjectivity and agency—because it seems implicit that her kenotic subject, who engages in self-emptying for others out of / towards passionate desire, risk-taking, and transformative becoming, is in many ways a self-aware agent—that is, a physically but also very much cognitively able subject. And I keep wondering if self-giving kenosis, this “power for,” might depend in some ways on a concept of agency that presupposes, and thereby values and necessitates, capacity for goal-oriented reasoning and conscious desires.

At stake here is a conception of kenosis that might render one more Christ-like than the other, as in the caregiver more so than the “other” with a disability, in which kenosis enables the already more agentic subject to enter into ever more transformative becoming through acts of self-giving. Certainly, Mercedes’s conception of kenosis is set up in a way that is critical and mindful of self-righteous and charitable kinds of self-giving, and she frames it in ways that highlights local desires and the for-another of those to whom we are passionately drawn as well as the dismantling of power over other lives. But how would this feminist kenosis emerge from and within persons with disabilities, especially those with profound cognitive impairments, without rendering their lives and relationships into the already stereotypical and marginalized existence of being “for us” (as in, we become better humans through the lessons we can learn from the spectacle that is “them”)? Is kenosis a possibility here, if it is not willfully chosen by a desiring agent? Would the desire that is part of kenosis be more difficult, or better, be more nuanced, and the dimensions of self-exploration and development become messy, fluid, “wet” because this self is differently able?

In appreciation and eagerness I look forward to a continued conversation.

Just last week, as I was returning from a theological gathering in Dallas with the Forum for Theological Exploration, I did something I otherwise—typically and intentionally—avoid: I engaged in conversation with the woman sitting next to me on my flight to New York. I don’t know what compelled me to initiate what started as casual, superficial small talk but what transpired over the next three and a half hours was, in retrospect, remarkable. In that liminal space in-between where I was coming from and where I was going, something happened to me and, I venture to guess, to her: we shared our stories and discovered uncanny commonalities, despite our differences in age, ethnicity, and profession; we experienced the adventure, risk, and vulnerability of disclosure without judgment; we saw ourselves anew through the eyes of another. There was an energy between us that radiated across and collapsed the space of the empty seat between us; there were tears and laughter in a beautiful combination that seemed simultaneously to make time stand still and proceed at rapid pace.

In our sharing, I told her I was delving into the provocative theological analysis proposed by Anna Mercedes in Power For: Feminism and Christ’s Self Giving because it made sense to bring it up: we were talking about women and power, sexuality and trauma, and the healing arts of ancient Taoist and Tantric practices. I was fascinated to hear her perspectives on sexuality and spirituality, pondering how these have been so distorted and bifurcated in the dominant narratives of Christian doctrine. Mercedes provides her reader with a thoroughly researched account of the literature on the kenosis of God, particularly how such interpretations have served to bolster the God-human relationship as one circumscribed by “power-over.” But our mile-high conversation led me back to reexamine Mercedes’s chapter on “Power for Ourselves: Kenotic Erotics,” particularly the critical lens offered by Marcella Althaus-Reid who invites us to consider how “human passions lure the kenosis of God, drawing God into the bedroom of queer desires, helping God to explore new identities” (80).

What/who would God be, what/who would we be, if we were to consider the possibility of God’s transforming subjectivity in relation to our own? I am fascinated by such a consideration, as proposed by Althaus-Reid and placed in nuanced conversation with others by Mercedes, because it blurs the lines of power and place; in fact, it transgresses, or queers, the lines of power and place of kenosis as “coming out, letting go, shifting subjectivities” (78). This proposition stands in sharp contrast to both the traditional Christian understanding of kenosis as “power in weakness and submission” as well as a Taoist affinity to dualistic energies of yin and yang, where the feminine is revered as the receptive principle, from which the energy of the Tao, through lowliness, is obtained. Mercedes’s analysis of kenosis seeks to rupture such dualistic modes of considering God-human subjectivity in relation; she pushes us toward a new understanding of kenotic passion that holds eros and agape in creative tension, which is simultaneously “self-effacing and self-interested . . . its generosity is generative” (83).

To be honest, a part of me resists such a movement, based on feminist and womanist critiques of self-sacrifice by women, differentiated by race/ethnicity, sex, gender, sexual orientation, class, and age. I know all too well the damaging effects of hearing the words of institution—“this is my body given up for you”—as license for a woman’s body to become the means to an end that is not of her choosing. Yet, Mercedes’s chapter on “Beyond ‘Power With’: Martyrs and Masochists” challenges my assumptions about pain and pleasure, and leads me to ask—as a womanist who prioritizes the experiences of black and brown women’s bodies that have been hypersexualized and commodified—can I ever venture into a space where pain is pleasurable and reflective of kenotic passion/compassion? This seems like dangerous waters in which to wade, and reminds me of the intrigue and interest in films like Fifty Shades of Grey or television shows like “Scandal” which blur the boundaries of pain, pleasure and subjectivity.

Mercedes’s work is definitely comfortable with the messiness and complexity that is third-wave feminism. There are no neat categories here of either kenosis or feminism. Part of me is uneasy about the messiness of such categories, given the impulse of theological scholarship to be systematic and precise. I know that I have inherited and internalized a “colonized” theology—discourse on God that perpetuates “power over” relations—while simultaneously resisting distinct categories through a postcolonial lens that recognizes and welcomes blurred boundaries. My own experience of healing through sexual trauma tells me something very different from the systematic theology I’ve inherited and internalized, leaning me in the direction of Mercedes’s proposal to “tap the kenotic power flowing from the broken side of Christ” (152), because we understand Christ’s brokenness as our own, and our own brokenness is of Christ. As a survivor of rape when I was a teenager, I did not identify what had happened to me as rape until I was in college and became conscienticized to feminism. Still, I didn’t talk about the experience until many years later—in therapy actually—as I was trying to come to terms with the extreme violation of my body in the past while pregnant with my first child. Somehow, in ways I’m still quite challenged to articulate, the direction of my energies toward this new, vulnerable, and precious creation did not distract me from the process of healing from the trauma; instead, it amplified my own power in the recognition of vulnerability, reflected back to me in the eyes of my daughter. In other words, I could be the fierce protector of my child, safeguarding her life at every stage while nurturing her growth and independence, and in doing so recognize that I was not a powerless victim that the experience of rape had thrust upon my identity for so long.

Many years later, I had a similar recognition as I decided to (finally) speak about the experience of sexual trauma in public spaces, specifically to undergraduate students at Iona College. In those venues, I told the story, my story, of violation and the silence that came after; in the self-giving of my own disclosure, the shame and blame that had haunted me for so many years gave way to a greater, more compelling sense of compassion toward the young women who hung on every word. “I don’t want this to happen to you; I’m telling you my story so it doesn’t become your story.” This now makes sense to me as I read Mercedes’s words: “Though we may also be victims, we are, with Audre Lorde, ‘responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense,’ and in the fierce pleasures of this responsibility, the passionate Christ survives” (152). I know this more now than I ever have. It was not in the way my story, my subjective self, was received or reciprocated that mattered; it was in the offering, the giving, for the sake of others, that “kenosis garners strength from its own gesture, and not by the final outcomes of society’s (mis)appropriation of it” (136).

Still, society’s (mis)appropriation of women’s self-giving and emptying must not be so easily dismissed because such kenosis does not occur in a vacuum. I believe we must make a full and complete accounting of the societal structures and intersections of racism, sexism, heteronormativity, homophobia, class disparities, and all categories of repressive power. While Mercedes attends to the feminist and womanist critiques of atonement theories and redemptive suffering, using Kathryn Tanner’s understanding of incarnation and the entirety of Jesus’s life, along with the cross, as the locus of salvation, I don’t believe Mercedes’s analysis pays sufficient attention to the particular embodied suffering of black and brown women whose resistance to abuse and exploitation, individually and systemically, can produce even greater suffering.

I am also left wondering where the community is present in the exercise of kenotic power. I am informed by a womanist insistence on the community, not simply the individual, as the locus of power through the expression of love: “A woman who loves another woman, sexually and/or non-sexually . . . She is committed to the survival and wholeness of an entire people, male and female. Not a separatist, except periodically for health . . . loves the spirit . . . loves struggle. Loves herself. Regardless” (Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, xii). Mercedes describes beautifully the generative, kinetic flow of outward energy toward others as the fullness of erotic and agapic love: “Christ is a gesture given away, power for. We ourselves cannot fully claim the incarnation of Christ; rather, Christ becomes between us and the ones with whom we are prodigally drawn, forgetting ourselves as we pour out our anointing oil, and perhaps also realizing ourselves in the exchange, our own skin wet with chrism” (148). This relational anointing has, for me, been realized and embodied—through the collective resistance of communities to undo structures of oppression. In other words, in the “thick of things” that social justice movements are often embroiled, the self-giving kenotic power for others and ourselves may be experienced. I have seen and felt this anointing in the collective work and struggles of black and brown women working for justice and dignity for our communities. As such, I long for a deeper analysis of community as an expression of power for resistance, a generative process that extends beyond the singular victim/survivor of abuse toward the collective power for resistance.

As I sit with the uneasiness Mercedes’s consideration of feminism and kenosis has created within me, I am drawn back to my chance meeting in the skies between Dallas and New York. There was something cosmological that occurred in that liminal space that was neither here nor there; something about that experience seems to approach the same discomfort I felt while sitting with Mercedes’s insistence on kenosis flowing “from fissures in the thick complexity of our present circumstances” (153). She refuses to settle on the inherited “either/or” nature of Christ’s kenosis and, in doing so, has thoroughly troubled already turbulent spaces. Perhaps we are in agreement: there is creative power in the cracks, crevices, and empty spaces in-between.